TCS Daily

More Scenes From a Mall

Last week's column
on Build-a-Bear and the mall experience got me to thinking about malls
and their role in modern American society. My sense is that it's a
subject that's not getting enough attention.

A couple of years back, I wrote here on what I called the comfy-chair revolution,
in which retailers worked to make their places more inviting, hoping
that customers would turn them into hangouts, as a way of competing
with sales via the Internet:

Retailers
have always tried to sell not just sweaters, but a lifestyle. But if
you become somebody's hangout, you don't just sell a lifestyle, you're
selling a life. If price and selection are the main basis for
competition, people can always buy on the Internet, but people --
teenagers especially, but everyone -- will still want a place to go.

(Here's a related piece that I wrote for The Wall Street Journal
at about the same time, noting that commercial spaces are answering the
long-proclaimed need for "third places" in American life, places that
are public, but that are neither home nor work.) It seems that I was
onto something. Reportedly, the new trend is toward a different kind of
mall, the "lifestyle center," which fits that description pretty well:

The
driving factor behind the new centers is changing shopping patterns and
increased retail competition. "Shopping centers are competing with the
Internet, among others, for sales today. So in order to draw customers
into the stores, they need to be more creative," Scott said. . . .

Lifestyle
centers combine some of the best elements from past retail developments
and city planning. Developers have been borrowing "new urbanism"
concepts to create a pedestrian-friendly environment that is
reminiscent of Main Street shopping. They are even incorporating
community-oriented amenities to further position the lifestyle center
as a gathering place. For example, Arbor Lakes also will be home to
public buildings such as the Maple Grove City Hall and a Hennepin
County Library.

And people are specifically invoking the "third place" point in pitching these facilities, as this account makes clear:

His
idea for Camano Commons, a 3.3-acre gathering place, is to try to
capture that European spirit of places where private commerce and
public leisure mix readily, said the project's marketing director,
Theresa Metzger.

"In Paris, you have the sidewalk cafe. In England, you have the neighborhood pub," Metzger said.

Ericson is aiming to create a space other than home and the office, sometimes referred to as third places.

"Americans
are so unfamiliar with third places, so I always like to describe it
this way: Remember the TV show, 'Cheers'? They didn't always get along,
but when somebody was missing, they got concerned," Ericson said.

I
think we'll see more of that. As I walk around my area mall, watching
blue-haired and multiply pierced Goths clustering in one area, and
Dungeons & Dragons-playing teens in another, as senior citizens and
families stroll by, it seems to me that the traditional downtown is
being replaced by commercial spaces. And that has its ups, its downs,
and its lessons.

The
"up" is that Americans are getting the kind of safe, diverse and
communal public space that critics of suburbanization have long called
for. Rather than being locked in their tract homes, watching television
and not knowing their neighbors, Americans are increasingly spending
their time in public spaces surrounded by all sorts of other people.

Another
upside is that -- instead of this taking place in huge, white-elephant
"downtown revitalization" projects funded by massive quantities of
taxpayers' money, as urban planners envisioned -- it's taking place in
a market-driven way, and in a way that actually generates
tax dollars rather than consumes them. And, because it's market-driven,
the comfy-chair revolution can turn on a dime to meet consumer needs
and interests.

The
downside is that the traditional "downtown" has been replaced by
corporate-controlled space. What's wrong with that? Well, in the
traditional downtown, things like the First Amendment's guarantee of
free speech apply. In malls, they generally don't. (One of my former
students has written an interesting law review article
on this subject). But that's where the people are, meaning that First
Amendment guarantees of the right to protest downtown are increasingly
meaningless when nobody goes downtown. (Indeed, here in Knoxville the
antiwar protests, such as they were, were held on the sidewalk in front
of West Town Mall, when the protest organizers realized that a weekend
protest downtown would be the proverbial tree falling unheard in the
forest.) Malls often have such offensive characteristics as omnipresent
security cameras coupled with draconian bans on picture-taking. It's
not like Singapore, exactly, but it's not the traditional downtown,
either.

But
there's a lesson, too. One reason why people go to malls instead of
downtown is that they feel safe. Part of this is physical safety.
(Though that's largely an illusion. Mall crime doesn't get reported
much -- all those advertisers make it easy to persuade local media to
keep it quiet -- but there's lots more of it than you'd think. Makes
sense: Criminals go where the money is, and a mugger would starve to
death in downtown Knoxville.)

But
more important than physical safety, I think, is the desire not to be
hassled by unpleasant people. Vagrants (relatively safe from
prosecution in light of Supreme Court decisions), panhandlers, and
accosters-of-pedestrians ranging from bible-thumping street preachers
to various political activists are all relatively free in downtowns,
thanks to the expansive First Amendment jurisprudence of the past
half-century. But they're barred from malls. And, in a curious
coincidence, that's where people tend to go. (How do people really
feel? I note that in the movie Airplane, the audience always cheers when the airport solicitors get beaten up.)

So
what's the lesson? Free speech absolutists (and I'm pretty much one
myself) may tell people that being hassled by loudmouths is part of
democracy. And people may even agree -- but they'll still choose the
mall over downtown if the hassle-factor gets very high. What that
means, among other things, is that public-sector rules are always
subject to private-sector competition. It also suggests that you can
enact rules that promote free speech at the cost of people being
hassled -- but that if you go too far, people will vote with their feet
by choosing a controlled environment with fewer hassles.